Tag Archives: art

Hi folks!

Earlier this week I took a whirlwind trip up to St. Petersburg; however – I did not go on a walkabout around this particularly beautiful city. What?…

Sure, I normally get out and about in St. Pete, but that’s because I tend to go there during the summer months – or at least in spring or fall; rarely in the depths of winter. But I’m no fan of bad, wintry weather – all gray and damp and the days being real short. So, like I say – no walkies. But we had something else planned – indoors: a visit to the Hermitage! ->

First up: see these pics? All as per (historically significant, beautiful, intricate, grandiose, opulent…) – right? But there’s one thing missing; can you guess what?…

Come on… worked it out yet?

Read on…

Salam, folks – from Saudi Arabia!

I was there last week at the Internet Governance Forum in Riyadh, where I was invited to give a speech about some of the lesser-known evils of the internet – and about our ideas regarding what to do to best tackle those evils. Traditionally, this annual forum has been attended by politicians and other government officials, representatives of international organizations, and so on. Only relatively recently have they started inviting folks from commercial companies – seemingly so as to get a better handle on the home truths about what’s really going on across the internet.

Since the event wasn’t dedicated to my core field (JIC: cybersecurity!), I didn’t stay around to listen to the other speeches. Thus, that’s all for today about the actual conference! However, I just have to tell you about the place where the event took place…

The forum took place in the enormous… palace (I can’t describe the building any other way) called the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center. And it seems it’s so luxuriously-exclusively grand and ritzy that there’s hardly anything about the place on the internet (e.g., no Wikipedia page) – yes, that same internet the governance of which the forum is dedicated to! Here’s how it looks from the outside:

Inside – breathtakingly beautiful opulence; here, for example, is the entrance hall:

The main hall:

Like? Then let’s take a closer look…

Read on…

Au revoir Algeria; bonjour France!…

Next up on my brief Africo-Euro November business-trip: Paris.

The Paris segment was busy on the work front: new acquaintances, meetings, negotiations – all as per. However – also as per – I just had to get some tourisms in: after all, this was Paris, no less. But, as luck would have it – the weather spoiled those plans somewhat: there was snow (in November!), it was windy, and it was freezing (in November?!). And this was Paris – not Kamchatka!!…

Looking out the window of my hotel room, there was no way I fancied venturing out given such murky, windy, cold and wet weather. Yes, we were in Paris – a European center of mindless mass tourism, but on a snowy November day there was absolutely nothing to be done!…

Snow in Paris in the fall. What?! :0)

Read on…

My next tale from the Japanese side is one of astonishment.

It’s not too often you see me astonished. But it does happen occasionally. It happened on the Kolyma Highway in Siberia – and not due to the extreme cold itself but its extraordinary bleaching effect on the surrounding landscapes. There was astonishment at the beauty to behold on the roads of Namibia. There was the way the company pulled through the covid pandemic. There was our vacation to the Galapagos Islands (pdf – 25MB). All these and more…

My latest astonishment came while visiting Tokyo’s TeamLab art-collective’s light-and-sound installations, which this post is all about.

Basically, it’s unbelievably cool. It all lasts just an hour-and-a-half, but the journey you take there through different halls digitally painted in the most insanely grandiose way – it’s, well… astonishing…

There are hanging strings of light that change color constantly ->

Read on…

Looking back over my travels during the month of May, I’m rather pleased: not bad at all for one calendar month. I visited three countries visited – Thailand, the Philippines (for the first time – country No. 105), and the Dominican Republic, and several cities therein-among: here’s my route in full:

Moscow > Thailand (Phuket) > the Philippines (El Nido, Mayon, Manila) > Moscow > Nizhny Novgorod > Moscow > the Dominican Republic (Punta Cana) > Moscow.

Fourteen flights, and 67 hours up in the air in planes and seven in a helicopter.

Along the way – four conferences/exhibitions of varying scale; talks at universities; interviews; and assorted other business. But the cherry on the cake for this super-busy May came on its last day back in Moscow – to see a ballet at the Bolshoi Theater…

Once a year, we get to bring together a small group of representatives of our dearest clients for a backstage buffet reception, followed by seeing a performance. And the seats we get come in different places – including in the Central Box! These photos were taken from there:

The ballet was La Bayadère:

Read on…

// Pre-scriptum! Do you know what Bolshoi means in Russian? You do now: Big!

In the summer of this year we signed a partner agreement with none other than Moscow’s Bolshoi! At the signing ceremony, we were kindly invited for a personal excursion around the theater. And the other Sunday that’s just what we got – hurray! This post is all about that unforgettable excursion…

Read on…

Hi folks!

Only just coming back to my senses after a mega-hectic few weeks in Southeast Asia on business. All went to plan, all good, plus a spot of micro–tourism was tagged on too. But after such an intense couple weeks, it was high time to lie low for a while – regroup, re-center, re-balance… all that. Then I needed to catch up and finish off my on-the-road tales from the APAC side, of course…

The next port-of-call on our Asia-Pacific tour was Singapore. Hurray!

I’d been to this city-island-state more than a dozen times before, and seen plenty of its places of interest. How many exactly? Going through my posts tagged with Singapore would probably tell you that, but let’s just say “many” – especially for such a small island. But if you do click on that link, you’ll also find lots on Singapore’s main tourist attractions, events, street scenes, hotel stays, eats, and so on and so forth. (Btw, perhaps the highlight among all my visits was the time I had the honor of being at a meeting and shaking hands with none other than Lee Kuan Yew (sadly no longer with us), the founding father of Singapore. That was I think way back in 2012 or 2013.) But there were still a few places I hadn’t yet checked out – with one that I’d been wanting to see for years: Singapore’s central park/nature reserve. But that was to come later on. First up – a walk to the National Gallery Singapore in the building of the Former Supreme Court. Why? First – hadn’t been; second – locals recommended them, and here’s why! ->

Read on…

Santiago and Sao Paulo are both real lucky: just an hour-and-a-half from each city there’s a resort town by the ocean. But while the temperature of the ocean by Brazil’s Guarujá is a comfortable one, that in Chile’s Viña del Mar is much less so. A cold current runs along the shore, so the water temperature is rather invigorating. Despite this, the whole shore is crammed with hotels:

Read on: Mind blown from red hot Chile peppers – and graffiti.

My customary busy schedule of business globetrotting sees me visit places equipped with some really interesting art expositions. And if said busy schedule grants me two-or-so hours of free time, you can guess where I normally head to fill those two-or-so hours. This ritual has seen me squeeze in visits, among many others, to:

• The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• The Daemons in the Machine exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow
• The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich
• The Bunker in Berlin

Art, arte, iskustvo, kunst. I love it. Mostly. But sometimes, especially when it’s of the modern/moderna/sovremennoe genre, things become… less straightforward, more ambiguous, somewhat contradictory. No matter, for it still always generates unusual thought processes related to the perception of aesthetic experience. And that’s just great!

Well just the other day, I had another arty outing – this time without even stepping onto a plane. It was another Moscow-based visit, and what a visit it was…

Now, do you want to boggle a little? (And, I do believe, the only thing one can boggle is a mind.) Or, rather, would you like to boggle your mind a lot? Or, rather, would you like to overboggle your mind? In that case, you need to get to the new ‘May the Other Live in Me‘ modern techno-art exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, a science-art project of the Laboratoria Art & Science Foundation, which we support. Why? Well, my mind was truly boggled, and my mind does take some boggling. So I highly recommend it to you too. Here’s my brief report and pics on the exhibition – you preview…

Read on…

Early June of 2019 was a quiet, nothing-special kind of early June. The world was rotating around the Sun as per, 19 days remained until the astronomical summer, ‘Corona’ meant a Mexican beer, and ‘covid’ meant absolutely nothing to anyone. In short, it was life as we knew it pre-pandemic: what we all could do with a lot more of today…

Meanwhile for the Kompany, we had our own schedules and timeframes, also as per. And early June, 25 months ago on our schedule was significant: it was when our big rebranding was taking place. The time had come for us to say goodbye to the old Korporate style (in terms of the logo, besides a whole lot of other stuff, including the fonts and other stylings and colorings and imagery, and what-have-you), which, given a few tweaks down the years, had been with us a full 22 years! It was out with the old and in with the new – a reboot, an upgrade, a Porsche, a rejuvenation, an image change; time for something different, more in line with the times, and also more polished; at least that’s what I was told (joke). No, really – it was to give us a new corporate style to more accurately reflect the company’s next stage of development – an ambitious yet confident stage, and certainly a futuristic one given our industry (cyber [the security thereof]).

But where others change their logo (slightly!) and have done with it, we had lots more in store. In fact, a full rebranding is a lengthy, complex process of tweaking perfecting all aspects of the identity and life of the company, including not only how we look on the outside, but also the way we interact with audiences, communication style, and scores of other things.

So yes; today’s post is all about rebranding. Now for some detail…

Work on our big rebranding began back in 2018. We’d known for a while how our good old logo/brand and messaging were more late-90s/early-2000s-oriented than 2019. For years we’d been sensing a certain dissonance between our technologies/products – which were always truly cutting-edge – and the image of the company to our users. For several years already we’d not been ‘just an antivirus company’ but a developer of broad-spectrum cybersecurity solutions. Yet still our logo was fairly antique with its pseudo-Greek letters. It was as if it was anchoring the company to the past – to the long-forgotten floppy-disk times.

For nearly a year we brainstormed, thought, compared, imagined, weighed up, discussed, argued, consulted, agreed then disagreed, considered, debated, deliberated… all so as to find the very best perfect fit for our rebranding. A conservative estimate at the number of logo variants our design team put forward gives at least… 300! Then, the final couple of candidate-versions were vetoed be moi. Not because I was being obstinate, but because I was being super obstinate simply didn’t see even in those final few prototypes one that resonated 100% with the company’s aims and values.

Oh, and here are the rejected variants! ->

Some curious near-misses (hits?!) occurred during the year of debate…

Read on…